Hi!
I'm a pretty novice circuit designer and am having some issues with one of my projects. The project is for a radiation detector that uses the x100-7 silicon pin photodiode to detect gamma rays. This project is for my senior design class at university. I'm trying to follow someone's circuit and it seems that i can't detect the pulse with my scope.
the circuit I'm trying out is:

http://einstlab.web.fc2.com/Xdetector/detector.html

I've tired the circuit on a breadboard and I'm worried that there is too much noise for my arduino to accurately detect anything useful. I also tried it on a prototyping board with little luck as well. I'm worried that my cheep scope (analog discovery) isn't good enough to detect the pulses. But then if i can't detect the pulse with my scope how is the arduino going to catch it? Do you guys have any suggestions for me to help make this thing work?
if you need any more information I'm happy to give that to you.
Thanks!

 

Not directly related but interesting -

http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/911/1/012004/pdf

https://www.jyu.fi/science/en/physics/studies/student-laboratory/gamma_radiation.pdf

https://scholarship.richmond.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1180&context=masters-theses

In general you have a very HiZ environment, due to TIA circuit, and very subject to
pickup. Enviroment lighting, like flourescents, LED dimmer circuits, lab equipment
very daunting. Shielding is everything.

http://www.ti.com/lit/an/sboa061/sboa061.pdf

http://www.ti.com/lit/an/sboa034/sboa034.pdf

http://www.analog.com/en/technical-articles/transimpedance-amplifier-noise-considerations.html

https://www.electronicdesign.com/analog/whats-all-transimpedance-amplifier-stuff-anyhow-part-1

Regards, Dana.

 

The devil is in the details.

Pulses from the detector can be very narrow, ~100ns.

What is the bandwidth of your Analog Discovery scope?
Which PIN photo-diode are you using? What is the size of the active area?
What is the DC bias voltage on the PIN diode?
What preamplifier are you using?
What are you using for a gamma source?